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Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Train-Car Crash 'Highly Unlikely'
By Phil Parker
Journal Northern Bureau
SANTA FE — The fact that an armored truck rolled across the Rail Runner Express tracks south of Santa Fe in a fatal crash during rush hour Monday afternoon didn't raise any red flags for the official in charge of the commuter train.
Lawrence Rael, executive director of the Mid-Region Council of Governments, said it remains "highly, highly unlikely" that a train-vehicle crash will occur along the portion of the Rail Runner route that runs down the middle of the Interstate 25 median between Santa Fe and La Bajada.
Monday's wreck was at least the second since the Rail Runner began running into Santa Fe in December in which a vehicle crossed or landed on the train tracks in the Santa Fe area.
In January, an SUV flipped several times before landing on the Rail Runner tracks north of Cerrillos Road on a portion of I-25 where the median is 300 feet wide. The fact that the SUV reached the tracks in that area was "a really unusual situation," Rael said at the time.
In Monday's crash, Brinks guard Vincent Fernandez, 34, was riding in the back of the southbound armored truck when the wreck occurred about 5:30 p.m. near the La Cienega exit. He was transported to Christus St. Vincent's Regional Medical Center in Santa Fe, where he died of severe head trauma, according to Lt. Eric Garcia of the New Mexico State Police.
The driver was in stable condition Tuesday with undisclosed injuries.
The death toll could have been significantly higher if not for the Rail Runner's infrastructure along that stretch of highway, according to Rael. "It easily could have landed on the northbound lanes of I-25," Rael said of the truck. "That would have been a much bigger calamity. In some fashion, the track and rail guard (along the northbound lanes) frankly saved lives."
Rael said this crash hasn't led to bigger concerns over the potential that an out-of-control vehicle on the interstate could crash into a moving Rail Runner train, or vice-versa.
"The likelihood of a vehicle and train colliding at the same time — I don't know the numbers, but it's highly, highly unlikely," he said Tuesday. "The amount of time the train is in the median is less than 10 minutes. I'm not saying it would never happen, but we don't have enough trains in that median on an hour-to-hour basis that it's a likely scenario."
According to Steven Flint, former chief of the state Traffic Safety Bureau, there were 209 crashes on I-25 from 1986 and 2006 — about 10 crashes a year — which could have resulted in a vehicle coming into contact with the Rail Runner tracks, had trains been running along the median south of Santa Fe during that period. Flint counted crashes in which cars either overturned off the left side of the interstate or crossed the median entirely.
Line-of-sight for Rail Runner engineers in that corridor further reduces the risk, Rael said, because a conductor can see up the tracks for three or four miles.
"Plenty of time to see a vehicle on the track and stop the train," he said.
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